Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Saturday August 13, 2005 @12:36AM
from the sure-why-not dept.

nate.oo writes "If you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod, don't bet your 60GB, 15,000-song model on it. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent applications that cover much of the technology associated with the iPod were submitted by Microsoft."

Of course Microsoft invented the iPod....just like they 'invented' the GUI (Apple), Active Directory (Novell), and the TCP-IP stack (BSD).You would be a fool and a communist to insinuate otherwise (apologies to Bill Hicks).

From TFA:

So far, Microsoft hasn't been able to dent the Apple iPod dominance

Hey, if you can't beat 'em, litigate 'em to death, I guess...and people bitch and moan when I use the abbreviation M$...

Not to mention that the Mac GUI is quite different than what they saw at Xerox.

For instance- One of the Apple guys swore that the Alto had windows that could overlap, so Apple sat down and figured out how "they" did it. Then, on a subsequent visit, Apple showed it to PARC, and the PARC guys were amazed. They hadn't even thought anyone would want overlapping windows, as they were using multiple large monitors.

Also not to mention that it isn't a copy if the same guys are working on both projects. Many of the PARC people went to Apple when they realized that Apple was actually going to bring something to market.

They were allowed just a look in exchange fir XEROX being allowed to invest 1 million USD in Apple, which wsa, at the time, a privately held company, and was bound to see massive growth when it IPOd. Think of the situation you would be in if you owned 1 million dollars worth of Google BEFORE the big IPO... after it you would be minted beyond your wildest dreams.

Make no mistake, Xerox got paid for the two trips Apple made to their research labs... and they got paid *WELL*.

As others have pointed out, Xerox got a lot of Apple stock in exchange for the technology, so they weren't "ripped off" by any definition of the term.

Additionally, Apple deserves some of the credit for turning a bundle of ideas at Xerox which, while implemented and eventually released as a commercial product, were far from "production ready". Apple invented the Desktop metaphor, spacial browsing and the iconic file management environment, overlapping windows, the double-click (for better or worse;), dragging, and dragged drop-down menus (where you point at the menu, put the mouse button down, see the menu appear, move the mouse to point at the option, and release the mouse button)

Some of these would probably still have been invented had Apple not done so. But Xerox didn't do it, Apple did, and Microsoft (and Digital Research and Commodore, and the GEOS people, and I guess the later groups who implemented what they did) for the most part did look at Apple's ideas, say, "Hey, that's cool! Let's use that!" and implemented their own versions of the same stuff.

I refuse to use the words "ripped off" or "stole" or even "copied" for the most part when applied to independent implementations of the same idea because I feel it's inappropriate and liable to be confused with copy-infringment. Early versions of Windows used relatively few of Apple's concepts and were a serious attempt to create a GUI from the ground up. Those who saw the internals of AmigaOS and GEM know that there was little resemblance between those operating systems and Apple's beyond the superficial, particularly in the case of the former where, in many ways, AmigaOS was how MacOS should have worked but never did. Jay Miner et al and Metacomco built a GUI that integrated very well with an underlying multitasking OS, that included a "Desktop" because, well, Apple did a great job of showing the idea was the way forward, and overlapping windows etc because a multitasking OS ought to have them.

All of which said, Apple genuinely innovated. It didn't "rip off" Xerox, and wouldn't have done so even if Xerox hadn't received a cent for Apple's work. Xerox built some nice prototypes. The concepts of icons and windows and pointing at things came from there. Apple used those concepts to build something fairly special. To use an analogy, Xerox built a weather-proof box out of bricks, wood, shingles, and drywall. Apple invented doors and windows and built the first house. A lot of people saw these "houses", and wanted to build their own, ones that fit them. Like Apple's, they included windows, doors, bathrooms, etc, but that didn't make them copies.

let me see if I get this: it's ok to say Microsoft "ripped off" something or that Apple "ripped off" the GUI from xerox,

A lot of people, myself included, find considerable irony in all the posturing about innovation and accusations of copying ideas from these two, when the basic metaphor underlying their desktops is well known to originate elsewhere.

Every now and again we like to point this out. Does this make us Bad People?

but software patents are bad because they disallow the sharing of ideas?

Well, look at it this way. Apple developed the iPod. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but apple popularised them, they did the hard work to develop a market and today they deservedly dominate the field.

And Lo! Here comes Microsoft coveting the market that Apple so carefully built. What is their chosen weapon to assail Apple's dominant position? Software patents.

If MS win the patent appeal, they're going to want royalties from Apple. They'll get a lump sum, and a slice of all future sales. These are costs that Apple will have no choice but to pass on to the customer. Meanwhile, MS has its own competing product which can now undercut Apple considerably since not only are they not paying patent licences, but they can subsidise the price with royalties from Apple. Look ahead 10 years and we can imagine MS owning 90% of the market, with actual iPods being considered technically better but overpriced.

Classic Microsoft.

Now the proponents of swpats tell us that they reward an inventor's hard work. I could argue about that being their proper purpose, but let's go with that for now. So who did all the hard work here? Apple did the cool design, and the marketing. And Apple pulled off the near impossible feat of getting record studios to agree to them selling online music at a price people would be willing to pay. That task also appeared on Bill Gates' todo list; just underneath cutting off his own left foot with a chainsaw.

And what did MS do? Well effectively, they have a big buzzword generator. It takes a technical term from column A, another from column B and one from Column C, and emails them to the Legal Dept. with a note saying "wrap these in the appropriate legalses guys". Then they send the result to the USPTO.

So who has done the hard work here? Apple. Who looks to walk away with the fruits of that hard work? Microsoft.

Instead of allowing people to profit from their own hard work, swpats are a licence for the big players to steal the fruits other people's efforts.

A lot of people, myself included, find considerable irony in all the posturing about innovation and accusations of copying ideas from these two, when the basic metaphor underlying their desktops is well known to originate elsewhere.

Alan Kay, the head of the PARC research group in question, seems to agree with you. Here's what he said in the first sentences of his "Early History of Smalltalk" paper:

"Most ideas come from previous ideas. The sixties, particularly in the ARPA community, gave rise to a host of n

They said they'd licence the patents. Depending on the terms, that licence would include a royalty payment, and they could well require backdated payments, which would come as a lump sum. I never said MS would try and block iPods - just push the price up far enough to make a competing MS product more attractive. They could probably even licence them on "reasonable terms". When you're dealing with iPod scale volumes, a small difference can have a huge impact on your margin.

From the same article:

But analysts said the situation could prove troublesome to Apple. The company would no doubt prefer to avoid paying royalties to its rival, especially in a field Apple popularized.

So apparently MS haven't ruled out requiring a royalty.

But even if Microsoft do choose to withhold their hand, we still have to ask why Apple should be dependant of their forbearance.
Why MS should be afforded this unearned privilege?

Mercedes has been developing the automotive airbag yadda yadda yadda...

And your point is?

immune from fair enforcement of those patents?

I don't recall suggesting anyone be immune to the fair enforcement of anything. The question I raised is whether it is fair that software patents be awarded in the first place since they do not
supply the benefits claimed by their supporters, and since they make possible a whole range of new tactics for unfair competition.

I don't know who "invented" MP3 players. They were around a LONG time before the ipod and before itunes, yet somehow because they happen to make the most popular mp3 player on the market this somehow entitles them to all the patents?

I don't recall anyone saying that Apple deserves patents on MP3 player technology, but just that Microsoft sure doesn't.

Or makes them immune from fair enforcement of those patents?

If those patents are filed after the product is already on the market, not to mention the numerous

For me, not exactly. The Creative QC is terrible. I wouldn't consider one at half the price over a competing Apple player. I have a shuffle, and even if the Muvo is the quintessential "best" player Creative's got, that's not saying much. I'd rather pay a little more for something that works than something that "might" work.Creative's never going to gain any market share trying to add 340 features to a device. They are going to lose it by putting out shoddy merchandise. You can't compete solely on price

While your "history" is vaguely correct, it's missing a great deal of real fact. Apparently, MS bought their TCP/IP stack from Spider software. This appears to have been licensed from UCB since the copyrights on it predate the open source release of the BSD TCP/IP stack.

Isn't this pretty ancient? There was an article on./ last week about an Apple patent being refused. In the end, the MP3 player was invented by Compaq anyway - yet another./ article from a couple weeks before.

Finally! Someone important in the tech industry with an ordinary name.

Bill Gates is pretty ordinary, but that was a long time ago.

Now I see Sergey Brin, Bruce Perens, Theo De Raadt, and David H???????? Hanson. Plus there's people that just happen to have the same names as famous people in non-geek circles, such as Dave Thomas. And I have a Sysadmin named Martha Stewart.

I hope Jeff Robin gets a little fame for his invention. It's no small achievement.

Do you think Edision and Bell were the only ones who were working on the the lightbulb and the telephone? No, but they got the patents and history remembers them as the inventors. I'm not saying this is right but it is not new.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but I had heard once that Edison employed several people just to dream up ideas for products. If he liked the idea, he'd go out and patent it as soon as possible.

The more I hear about Edison, the less inspiring he appears to be. Wasn't he the one that electrocuted animals to disprove the theories of Nikola Tesla?

Edison was briliant, but yes, IIRC, he was also likely a jerk, a petty one at that.

What I heard was that he wanted to discredit alternating current (AC) power, and electrocuting animals was his way of doing it. Edison favored direct current (DC) power. The problem is that given the technology of the time, and it is still largely true today, due to the physics involved, AC is generally a better long-distance electrical power transmission method.

It wasn't just animals, Edison invented the AC electric chair to "prove" AC was more dangerous than DC. He was spreading FUD to protect his investment in DC and in turn the gas companies spread FUD against his electric street lights.

"The physics involved" haven't changed, only what was practical has changed. LOW VOLTAGE DC requires large conductors to avoid high losses and there was no efficient way of converting it from one level to another a century ago. AC has the huge advantage in being easily transformed via.. er, transformers.

That's no longer exclusively true. And power loss is directly proportional to resistance but proportional to the square of the current, so doubling the voltage in a circuit cuts those losses much larger than half.

Meanwhile, low frequency AC transmission has all sorts of losses over long hauls due to reactive coupling to earth and to the atmosphere, and these losses vary even depending on the weather.

Rectifiers and inverters can be made very efficient these days, and long haul powerlines increasingly may carry 750KVDC or more on them... that's direct current, not alternating.

The higher voltage DC transport is more efficient, you see... but now we have the technology to exploit it.

Yes, Edison electrocuted many animals, but it wasn't to disprove Tesla's theories. Rather, it was to 'demonstrate' that AC electricity (Tesla's system), was more lethal than Edison's preferred DC. Edison put on elaborate shows in which he electrocuted horses, dogs, elephants, and just about any other animal he could get his hands on (he was also known for paying children 25 cents for each stray dog they could bring him). Edison claimed that while AC electricity was obviously lethal, DC was not (which is patently false).

Interesting that Edison's name is synonomous with electricity even today, although the electricity we use in our homes is Tesla's alternating current.

Edison had teams of people working for him. He basically industrialized inventing. Really he was more of a "brute force" inventor than posessing any real brilliance. One quote I really like from Tesla about Edison:

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

1. A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
2. Letters patent.
3. An invention protected by such a grant.

We can quibble about the US Patent system and how they grant patents to non-original inventions all day, and we can quibble about how this may be one of those cases, but ling

Furthermore, inventing != inventing in a very important sense of the word. Not much of the technology in iPods was very novel or interesting--we'd seen all the technological pieces in other places before. Apple didn't "invent" the iPod in the sense that they came up with some new innovative way to play mp3s, or to fit that much player in such a small size, or even a great user interface. Those things had all been done in other places at other times to varying degrees of success.

What Apple did was create a beautiful device, something that was more of a fashion accessory than a geek toy. That was the revolution; that was what Apple "invented"; and that's why even though you can buy a similar mp3 player with more functionality for less money, iPods remain king. Apple didn't invent any one piece of the technology--they brought together existing technology in a functionally beautiful way, and wrapped it all up in an aesthetically beautiful package.

Sure, maybe we can do that later. We'll do the Nostradamus "they're doing X so then they'll do Y because of Z" theoretical paranoid-type of discussion you probably enjoy very much. In the meantime, what part of:

Please provide some examples of Microsoft using patents to pressure their competitors

The competitor MS cares about the most is OpenSource and GPL. But that war will wait until Software patents are ratified in the EU, China, etc.

The issue of Software patents is a touchy one, and MS is desparate to have it approved. They even went as far as blackmailing the government of Denmark. They know that it wouldn't be constructive to give any extra ammo to it's opponents at such a critical time.

The goal of MS is to subsume OpenSource or extinguish it. Remember the failed MS email standard that contained both a submarine patent and licensing that strictly forbid GPL developement? MS allowed that technology to die stillborn rather than bend and allow GPL use of any of it's patents (as IBM does, see here [ibm.com]).

Once software patent laws are in place and enforcible, do you honestly think that MS would not use Software Patents to toast the one competitor it could never control/buy/extinguish, Open Source and the GPL?

Yes, I know the party line. You, Richard Stallman and everyone else has been claiming for years that Microsoft is about to unleash patent hell on everyone.

I would believe your insightful argument if it actually addressed my original question and - more importantly - it wasn't Microsoft getting hit every other month by IP farms and submarine patents and having to fight or pay them off in order to do business. I'd buy it if it wasn't for the fact that IBM has about 10 times more patents that Microsoft, and

Why would they file a patent for it, but then allow Apple to develop, create, and market the device?

Or am I misreading this? Did they file a patent for something that vaguely described a system of some sort used in the iPod? That wouldn't really surprise me, seeing how they've recently tried to patent a method for highlighting numerical data with a box.

The article mentions that Microsoft submitted a patent on a "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player" - i.e. a completely open-ended and substanceless junk patent. Or maybe the patent did have some merit, but who knows, since the article doesn't give more details. The one detail it does mention is in regards to a playlist feature that the iPod doesn't have.

On the brighter side, the not so subtle combination of Microsoft, Apple, vague patents and the iPod should make for a orgiastic troll feeding frenzy in the comments. And Techweb got some more traffic and hopefully some ad revenue. Hooray.

I feel compelled to correct this misconception as a public service every time I see it.Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. He said he backed funding (repeatedly and against republican opposition) for the Arpanet which became the internet.

He was misquoted deliberately (and repeatedly) by a group of right wing press until the lie became main stream. So now you can find many reasonable moderate people who believe he originally made the claim.

I think that's pretty clear. Obviously, he was a greasy politician trying to take credit for the work of others. Maybe from where he was at, it made sense, but that just shows you how out-of-touch people in politics are.

What does "take the initiative" mean?You seem to think it means "invent". That is just a narrow interpretation.

Gore meant "secure funding for and push for its development", which a very good definition.

Read up higher in this very thread. See how it says that "Tesla's AC beat out Edison's DC". You could say that "George Westinghouse took the initiative in creating the power grid" even though George invented nothing. Instead, George listened to Tesla, agreed that it was important, and funded him.

Tony Fadell first conceived of iPod outside Apple; he had difficulty finding funding for a MP3 player he had designed. When he demonstrated it to Apple, the company hired him as an independent contractor to bring his project to the market, putting him in charge of assembling the team that developed the first two generations of the device. --

Did Microsoft invent the iPod? No. Did Apple? No. The idea that either company invented the mp3 is ludicrous -- both were years behind numerous companies.

Unless Microsoft somehow patented the idea of a well designed stylish mp3 player their patent is so laughably easy to dismiss with prior art it stands as just another example of how lazy, inept & stupidty-riddled the US Patent Office is.

i think/. is slowly becoming less of 'stuff that matters' and more of a popularity contestant.
'i know! let's publish articles that bash microsoft and make apple look like a victim/saint...it can't fail!'
'yes! by jove, you got it!'
EVERYONE who isn't busy following paris hilton is busy getting patents for anything they can. I remember, as a college senior, doing my senior design project, one week we were made to look thru the US Patent Office website and find possible 'patent infringements' for our de

Winamp + 486 Is actually less powerful than an iPod. and I've been playing sounds on a computer for ages. Man I wonder what Mr. Nakamura (apologies if I spell it wrong) thinks of the idea of M$ thinking they are first with portable sound. Of course years before the iPod was released a product named the Diamond RIO was fighting for it's life against companies like M$ (under the guise of the BSA) for it's portable MP3 players. (bought mine in 98 or 99)

Apple patents, Microsoft patents, IBM patents, Sun patents. They all claim they are only doing it for good, but then they all go around suing people.And the patents themselves are pretty iffy. If you only allow Microsoft's narrow claims, than Apple probably doesn't infringe and could trivially work around them. If you allow Microsoft's broadest claims, then they just patented finding other songs you like based on a bunch of examples--a trivial and obvious idea implemented by many people.

A team of engineers at another company did and sold the finished product to Apple.

Guess again.

Tony Fadell brought the idea of a music player + a music store to Apple. He didn't bring a finished product. The design we know today was the result of a collaboration by Fadell, Jeff Robbin, Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Ive, and many other people. Steve didn't "just take the credit", he made it happen.

The lightbulb [wikipedia.org] is likely an essential device to modern living. (if someone disagress then more power to you:) It remains to be seen if the PDA and MP3 player follow suit. I believe the phone has already hit that point. And on the matter of points my point is anywhere from a 120 to 150 years ago the lightbulb was invented by numerous different people in various forms. I had always thought Diamond invented the MP3 player with the Rio,wiki [wikipedia.org] says it was Eiger labs. However the minute MP3's became common eve

"The documents describe a "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player" that can manipulate MP3 music files."yes, it would be very nice if the iPod could manipulate MP3s, not just play them. Or at least fast forward/rewind within a song/track, now that would be very nice for longer songs, think those BBC Beethoven tracks, and ebooks when it suddenly gets lound on the train/bus/where ever and you miss something. I'm yet to see a portable device that can do that, but I've only used the iPod mini Zaurus5500

They just claim to have invented everything. Spoons, toasters, web commerce, you name it, they have filed or have tried to file a patent for it, blatantly months, years, or decades after the same idea has already been brought to market and would take a non-braindead patent clerk 2 minutes to find prior art on.

Just look at all the slashdot articles. We see one about every 2 weeks for MS trying (succceeding?) to patent things there's blindingly obvious prior art for. Nothing new here. Tomorrow they'll try to patent the computer case, using about 850 words to describe "a metal box you put a computer in" in such complex verbage that the patent clerk will think "I have no idea what he's talking about and have never heard ANYTHING like that before so it MUST be original". *STAMP* ("Approved")

Not that it counts for much, but I will at least say they don't spend all their time chasing down "patent infringers" for their thousands of silly patents. I think they do it more for defense than offense, unlike some we've seen here recently.

Oi! We have now had TWO completely wrong-assed stories about this same event in slashdot. #1 was some bumf about "Apple failing to get patents to the iPod" because of some vaguely related patent by some Microsoft spod. Now that's turned into Microsoft invented the iPod?

Render unto us a grand holy rotating break, Taco. At least read your own damn articles before accepting a new one. Or at least apply some damn common sense when you get funky spin like these.

If they are as bad as people claim them to be, what can I do to help change the situation?

Get your neighbors to sign petitions against any elected official that is about to vote on any type of legislation that would increase the power of software/all patenting. Likewise, get them to sign petitions in favor of signing legislation in favor of dampening or removing software/all patents.

I am particularly interested in patent law, though I am nothing more than a computer programmer, much less a lawyer.

Groklaw is a very good place to get more of a handle on some of what software patents are about. I have yet to come across a good all-around resource regarding the state of software patents, so I end up perusing the patent office's site quite often.

To answer your main question, software patents are thought to be a "bad thing" because patents were designed to protect an implementation of an idea...Edison didn't patent "creating light with an electrical device", he patented the incandescent lightbulb. Software makes this otherwise simple model a mess, because there is no clear line between the *effect* of something, and it's *implementation* in software. Sure, there are a bunch of clean cut cases, but there are also a lot of muddy cases.

Worse, software patents are very easy to abuse. For example, companies have patented things like the "double click", scrollbars, and drop-down menus. These days, it becomes a veritable mine-field of patents to avoid when writing even the simplest of GUI applications.

In one of the most astonishing software patent debacles, a shadow-rendering trick presented by John Carmack thereafter known as "Carmack's Reverse" was patented by a company later bought by Creative (of Sound Blaster fame) and used a scant week before Doom 3's release date to strong-arm Carmack into coding EAX support into his Doom 3 engine to avoid litigation.

The idea that a company spends lots of money to develop algorithms, and that those algorithms should be protected is a good one. The problem is that the vast majority of software patents are not used in cases like that; they are used in cases where a company likes to lie in wait for their competitors, and only after a competitor becomes a serious threat to they negotiate with their patent portfolio. Because patents (unlike copyrights) cost so much to apply for (not just application fees, but technical writing and legal fees), the software patent system keeps companies like Microsoft in their monopolistic lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, often at the expense of their competitors and, ultimately, the consumer.

Free software in particular is a fundamentally generous act, and is capable of providing great benefits to areas of the world that would not otherwise be able to afford computing. Similarly, it frees those who choose to use it in first-world countries from the monopoly that Microsoft enjoys, allowing us to run operating systems that do not require re-registration when the hardware in the comuter is altered, or keeping track of registration keys. But Free Software's future is in jeopardy because of the patent system that benefits the large corporations. You would be hard pressed to find a piece of free software that doesn't violate someone else's software patent one way or another.

There are many approaches to correcting the system, but one of the most obvious would be to raise the bar for what qualifies as innovative enough to deserve a patent. The article earlier today about highlighting numbers is a perfect example: a concept so simple that it seems like a good excercise for a beginner's book on C or Java, not a patent for a multi-billion dollar corporation to be filing. The ease with which something can be programmed is not the sole measure by which we should judge a patent, but it is a starting point. Other factors might include things like the amount of resources it would take to develop such a design.

At some point we need to admit to ourselves that our notions of intellectual property must change in an era where media can be so freely copied and exchanged. The nature of the economies that support industries resting on intellectual properties must shift, perhaps acknowledging that intellectual property should not be a luxury, but a commonplace product in most everyone's lives. This would allow more people to enjoy t

Claiming software is patentable is like claiming man is center of teh universe, the earth is flat, the universe revolves around the earth, etc..

It wasn't until the early 1990s that the catholic church exonerated Galileo for his honesty about some such things. Showing how ignorant and dishonest some can be.

THIS IS IMPORTANT:The exoneration came as a result of the church losing followers over this denial of honesty of reality. Important because it sets an example and solution direction for the software patents deception.

Software is NOT patentable. There is no comprimise here, only frauds. Those in denial of honesty about software trying to convince others of their dillusions.... pretty much most of the computer industry,

This is no differnt than the suppression of the hindu arabic decimal system and its, how can nothing have value, zero place holder, by the roman catholic church in its persistant elitism of the roman numeral system of accounting and math.

Today we know better, that there are btter ways to do math, simpler, easier, etc...

Software is no different, only the symbols used go beyond numerical assigned value...

What is not patentable, universally accepted, include physical phenomenon, natural law, abstract ideas. Software is composed of all of these, is created and works on the foundation of these. Even the idea of algorythims (something else really not patentable and has been on the list of "NOT PATENTABLES") is itself of these top primary things not patentable.

Copyright is appropriate, so software is not without some form of IP protection.

The fact of the matter is: As soon as we get past the roman numeral way of programming, programming will become as common place as the application of the hindu arabic decimal system is. Even being taught in primary school.

Software is the automation of complexity so as to make that complexity usable and reusable to the users of that complexity through a simplified interface, like how a calculator automates mathmatics, simplifying and providing accurate calculation, as opposed to doing it in a non-automated manner, manually..

Software creation is also recursive in this. Rarely does any programmer not use the automations of another before them, in their creation of some program.

Automation via abstraction is a natural product of conscious beings, as it take conscious ability to comprehend abstractions of such a level to enable automation.

In other words, its not only our natural human right, but duty, to make use of abstractions that allow us to advance our understanding of reality and control over it.

Yes the economy, the incentive behind the deception of the fraudlent promotion of "software patents" needs to change to remove the incentive to try to, or continue to, deceive the public.

World economy, along with other related factors, is reaching a level of well being that its getting to be time to step off the current stepping stone of incentives to advance and onto the next one. I believe Free Open Source Software is mans first recognition of that next stepping stone.

Software patents are bad because the very essence of them is dishonest and anti-productive of man and his contribution to human advancement.

It really is that simple.

Software patents in the US came about thru small courtroom squablings of who the best lier/fraud was. Who was best able to use "Abstractions" to mislead others.

In Europe, not only was the european public allowed in on the decission process, but the world. OPEN, again OPEN, to the intelligence of the population.

If it affects the population, then the population only rightfully has a say. Otherwise its not being honest about human ability and intelligence as a whole.

On what basis did you arrive at this? Diamond Multimedia was the first to market such a device in the late 90s.

Also the patent that is cited is extremely vague in its actual implementation. For the most part the AutoDJ patent affects software like WinAmp, RealPlayer, and iTunes more. The patent seems to cover a process on how computer algorithms might select the next song to in a list based on what the user has listened to in the past. Nowhere does the patent mention or reference how the songs are played like a mp3 player, CD player, etc.

have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together.

Does your theory involve actually knowing what eigenvalues are, or are you just making shit up?

At best I'm guessing you're trying to imply some sort of principal component analysis [wikipedia.org] across properties of the tracks, which involves finding eigenvalues (and eigenvectors) of the covariance matrix. That doesn't really make sense though because most of the properties are categorical (artist, genre, title, album) so PCA is hardly going to be meaningful, let alone help songs "flow together".

Other alternatives include trying to do some level of correlation across the Fourier transform [wikipedia.org] of the actual music (end of one track correlating with beginning of next), but aside from failing to account for volume and beat information, it also fails to have anything whatsoever to do with eigenvalues.

Finally you could take Fourier transforms, statistics on mean and variance of volume, beats per minute etc., and the user rating of the track, as one huge multidimensional space, throw it through PCA and select the closest track in the re(multidimensional)scaled space, which would actually give some semblance of "flow" and even use eigenvalues somewhere in the whole process... but that's an awfully large amount of heavy lifting to do compared to just picking a track at random which can do a surprisingly good job.